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Daily Star’s tacit support for EDL is no surprise

Wednesday's front page of the Daily Star has been widely seen as an endorsement of the English Defence League. Roy Greenslade of the Guardian called it "a clear piece of propaganda on behalf of the EDL", while the Independent's Ian Burrell asked, "Has the Daily Star decided to back the EDL?"

It's just a coincidence, of course, that Richard Desmond should moot the EDL's spiritual home of Luton as the base for his newspapers, but it couldn't be better timing. Who knows? Maybe the EDL will hold a "Welcome to Luton" street party for Star hacks when they arrive at work for the first time in Bedfordshire.

My fellow media blogger Five Chinese Crackers expresses the view of many of us who viewed the Star as just a worthless comic and not worthy of serious criticism, saying: "I hardly ever looked at the Star, since it exists primarily as a vehicle for selling pictures of tits to stupid people," but admits we're going to have to start taking it seriously now.

This is, after all, a national newspaper – of which there are only ten – aligning itself with an organisation that many consider to be odious, hostile to freedom and deeply unpleasant. Of course, as many other bloggers have documented down the years, Daily Star headlines often bear little or no relation to the stories below, and it's a similar case with this one. The EDL boss saying "We aren't ruling it out" is alchemised into "EDL to become political party". No matter. The Star has its story, and backs it up with a remarkably chummy editorial column.

It's been coming for a while. Back in November, Hope Not Hate wrote politely to the Star asking the paper to tone down its coverage of Muslims. It came on the back of a Star poll which found that 98 per cent of readers feared Britain was becoming a Muslim state – the most recent poll found that 98 per cent of readers, perhaps not entirely unrelatedly, backed the policies of the EDL.

At the time, I looked at the reaction on nationalist and EDL message boards and blogs, and found it was highly positive. One blogger wrote, delightedly, "This is the first article I have read, from both the national and regional media, that hasn't been critical of the EDL," and hoped for more in the future. It would seem that wish has been granted.

It seems an odd decision, on the face of it, from the Star to be so matey with the EDL. Perhaps 98 per cent of Star readers really do support the EDL; and phone polls are entirely representative of a readership's feelings on any particular subject. Perhaps there is a lot of latent support for the EDL from ordinary Brits who feel angry at what they see as the Islamification of their country, based on the kind of stories they read in the Star (and elsewhere, in slightly more complicated terms). Perhaps it's just a way of targeting a narrow demographic as a way of tunnelling out of the general slump in newspaper sales, abandoning broad appeal in favour of a particular type of reader.

As I said last week, newspapers may be reflecting their readerships, but if they're just confirming prejudices rather than reporting what's actually going on, that erodes the credibility of all newspapers even more.

If you look back further, this was a newspaper that would have had a "Daily Fatwa" edition published, had it not been for a revolt by the newsroom's union chapel. So, this isn't a new flirtation, but perhaps rather a "coming out" by the Star, and perhaps is to be welcomed by the rest of us. At least we know what we're dealing with now, and it's out in the open. At least we know where they stand.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.